A pot cookbook, a treatise on changing Cuba and a local Sherlockian expert are all in the spotlight this week at Denver bookstores. Here’s where to pick your poison:
Robyn Griggs Lawrence and Povy Kendal Atchison
The Cannabis Kitchen Cookbook: Feel-Good Food for Home Cooks
Tattered Cover Book Store
7 p.m. Wednesday, November 18
Free
It’s one thing to cook with pot, another to do so safely, effectively and deliciously. Author Robyn Griggs Lawrence has gathered tested recipes from cannabis chefs across the nation, along with their advice in cracking the evolving art of marijuana cuisine, in a home-kitchen tome with photographs by Povy Kendal Atchison. Meet them both when they talk about and sign copies of the book; local contributors Scott Durrah, Catjia Redfern and Lucie Lazarus, along with Women Grow co-founder Jane West, will also be at Tattered's Colfax location to join in the discussion.
Jason Flores-Williams, Mirror of Cuba/Espejo De Cuba
Mutiny Information Cafe
7 p.m. Saturday, November 21
Free
New Mexico civil rights attorney and whistleblower Jason Flores-Williams, who represents a figure from the past — Black Panther co-founder Charlie Hill, who famously hijacked a plane to Havana in 1971 after being accused of murdering a police officer and now wants to come home — has spent some time with his client in Cuba, a nation in flux after the U.S. reestablished diplomatic relations with the communist island nation earlier this year. He’s now published Mirror of Cuba, an essay outlining his work for Hill; learn firsthand from Flores-Williams about what’s going on on Cuba when he hosts a reading and discussion on November 21 at Mutiny Information Cafe. Suspect Press editor Brian Polk will also be reading.
Derrick Belanger
West Side Books
6:30 p.m. Sunday, November 22
Free
Broomfield author and publisher Derrick Belanger is a student of all things Sherlock Holmes, resulting in such books as A Study in Terror, Volumes 1 and 2, and a kids’ comic series featuring the MacDougall Twins with Holmes. Still on his writing docket: young-adult novel Sherlock Holmes and the Transformers of Time, teaching guide Sherlock Holmes for Teachers, pastiche novel The Funeral of Sherlock Holmes, and a film studies book The Hound of the Baskervilles: From Page to Screen. He’s also an aficionado of Denver’s West Side Books, where he’ll read from a selection of his books just in time for some holiday shopping. Come listen and you might get lucky: A pair of tickets to the International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science will be given away as a door prize.
What's on the next page in Denver's literary world? Visit Westword's Literary Event listings for this week.